The crisis of Chinese stalinism
Socialist Outlook magazine1980sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
PHIL HEARSE offers a historical overview of the developments in China, and an assessment of the issues at stake and the factional struggles in the leadership which paved the way for the dramatic events in Beijing.
The extraordinary anti-bureaucratic movement of the Chinese students and workers has arisen from the inequalities and injustices created by the home-grown version of 'market socialism', a precursor of 'perestroika' in the Soviet Union.
This has involved the de-collectivisation of agriculture, the re-establishment of a strong private sector in industry (partially in collaboration with international capital) and the restoration of the profit motive as the guiding force in the economy. It has also meant huge attacks on the basic rights of employment and wage-equality enjoyed by the Chinese working class (the so-called 'iron rice bowl').
'Market socialism' in China has gone much further than in the Soviet Union; what we want to attempt to answer here is the question why the Chinese leaders adopted this road, and what its consequences have been. To get to grips with this it is really necessary to attempt an understanding of the drift of the Chinese economy, social struggles and politics since the 1950s.
From the 'Great Leap Forward' to the 'Cultural Revolution'
The victory of the revolution in 1949 created the basis to begin the process of industrialisation in China. Between 1949 and 1951/2 a single unified state, with a single currency was created; large industry was bit-by-bit taken over (although with huge payouts to the former capitalist owners) and the collectivisation of agriculture begun. The Mao Zedong leadership, copying the pattern of development in Stalin's Russia, put the main emphasis on the development of heavy industry, at the expense of resources to light industry and agriculture.
The significance of this one-sided emphasis closely parallels some of the debates which took place in the Soviet Union between the Stalinists and the Left Opposition over the pace of industrialisation and relations between industry and the peasantry. By putting all the emphasis on heavy industry – in other words trying to force the pace of industrialisation beyond what was sustainable by a poor economy based on agriculture – the Maoist leadership created an economy which failed to produce goods for exchange with the peasantry, and for the mechanisation and development of agriculture.
It is true that thanks to collectivisation, agricultural productivity increased. But by the mid-1950s the imbalance between heavy industry and light industry and agriculture was obvious, with agriculture lagging way behind. After a fierce debate on the way forward in 1955-7, (the so-called 'rectification campaign' and the 'let a hundred flowers bloom' campaign) Mao decided to attempt to break out of the vicious circle by an extraordinary voluntarist mobilisation of the peasantry – the 'Great Leap Forward' of 1957-9.
The Great Leap Forward is seminal in understanding the character of the Maoist leadership, as we shall show. In the Great Leap millions of peasants were organised into giant 'Peoples Communes' each of thousands of people. The Communes were to be giant centres of agricultural production and at the same time rural-industrial production centres. Everywhere ad-hoc iron and steel producing units were set up in backyards, both in the towns and in the countryside. The peasants were coerced into the Communes. All private property of the peasants, including land plots and personal possessions were confiscated. A semi-military discipline prevailed.
The Great Leap was hailed by idealistic foreign observers as one of the great breakthroughs in developing countries of the century. In fact it had some parallels with the forcible collectivisation of the peasantry in Russia. The whole exercise can be described as left-bureaucratic voluntarism, typical of Mao Zedong's thought. Its result was disastrous all round. The whole economy went into anarchy and crisis, as agriculture became less productive and industry was dislocated by tens of thousands of ad-hoc experiments in steel production. A huge drought in 1959 further added to the catastrophe. It is now known that millions of peasants died of starvation as a direct result of the crisis. The Great Leap led to a huge fight inside the upper ranks of the bureaucratic apparatus.
The debate over the Great Leap began to intersect with a struggle over 'military policy' and the debates inside the international communist movement. Army leader Peng Dehuai (Peng Teh-huai), commander of the Chinese troops during the Korean war, stressed the need for a modern conventional weapons and a modern conventional army to meet the threat of imperialism. Mao on the other hand stressed the importance of guerrilla warfare, 'peoples war'. The link of this debate with foreign policy was of course that the only realistic source of the most up-to-date weapons was the Soviet Union. Peng Dehuai tended towards an alliance with the Soviet Union, while Sino-Soviet relations were coming under heavy strain.
The debate over the Great Leap, and foreign and military policy came to a head at the 'Lushan conference' (so named after the city in which the Central Committee plenum was held) in August 1959. Ranged against the Mao leadership was Peng Dehuai, and old time CP leader Zhang Wentian, tacitly supported by the mayor of Beijing Peng Zhen (Peng Chen). The proceedings of the Lushan conference have never been published, but in its wake the Great Leap was abandoned, the communes were scaled down or disbanded and the experiment in backyard steel production was abandoned. On the other hand, Mao's political leadership emerged strengthened. Peng Dehuai was purged.
But out of the events leading up to the Lushan conference, two distinct factions had emerged in the leadership – that led by Mao and including as a moderating influence Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), and the other led by Liu Shaoqi (Liu Shao-chi) and ... Deng Xiaoping. The debate between the two was essentially a debate about the form of bureaucratic rule. Deng and Liu opposed the 'left' policy of bureaucratic mass mobilisation and voluntaristic lurches, and looked to the more 'stable' and 'conservative' form of rule which existed in the Soviet Union. In practice this meant more concessions to the rich and middle peasants, a slower rate of industrialisation and a move away from China's international revolutionary rhetoric towards a more open embracing of peaceful co-existence with imperialism.
1965 was a key turning point in this factional struggle. In August of that year the pro-Chinese Indonesian Communist Party, which co-ordinated its strategy closely with Beijing, was massacred by an army coup (with over one million dead). Many Chinese leaders blamed Mao for the fiasco. After the Indonesian defeat Mao left Beijing and went to Shanghai for six months, leaving participation in the leadership bodies of the party and state. In fact Mao had gone to Shanghai where the party leadership was loyal to him in order to prepare his counter-attack. Out of it came the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution'.
The Cultural Revolution was one of the most momentous – and most misunderstood – events of modern times. Widely acclaimed by the left in the West as a fight against bureaucratism and the continuation of the class struggle under socialism, it was in fact a struggle by Mao and the left-bureacratic faction in the leadership, to defeat their factional opponents. Millions of high school and university youth were mobilised as 'Red Guards' by sections of the party loyal to Mao and the army to defeat 'top party people in authority taking the capitalist road'.
Far from being a democratic mass movement the Cultural Revolution was a reign of terror and philistinism in which thousands were murdered, tortured and humiliated by Mao's youthful zealots. Liu Shaoqi died in prison in 1968 after being brutally tortured in 'struggle sessions' against him. Peng Dehuai eventually died in jail in 1974 after being tortured more than 130 times and kept in barbaric conditions. The cult of Mao's personality, the sayings of Mao's 'Little Red Book' and the fanatical destruction of 'bourgeois' culture thrust China into obscurantism and chaos.
In effect Mao Zedong represented a minority in the leadership of the party and went outside its formal structures to mobilise millions of youth against the leadership majority.
The Red Guards were used as the shock troops to smash regional and local party organisations opposed to Mao. Key to his alliances was the leadership of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), personified by army leader Lin Biao (Lin Piao). His famous text 'Long Live the Victory of People's War' (1965) is the classic statement of Mao's line on military policy against the 'rightist' views of Peng Zehuai.
Inevitably, however, the mass movement generated by the Red Guards got out of control, despite the huge effort at organising them by the PLA. In industrial centres workers fought back against the Red Guard thugs. Different factions emerged amongst the youth and workers fighting over what was the correct interpretation of 'Mao Zedong thought'. In many towns, pitched battles using firearms and even armoured cars were fought between different factions of the Red Guards: more and more local workers organisations and the army were drawn into the military conflict. Mao instructed the PLA to 'support the left' in these struggles, but it became impossible, in the profusion of Red Guard and 'revolutionary rebel' groups fighting one another to decide who the 'left' was. The country was brought to the brink of economic and political collapse.
When Mao had declared 'bombard the headquarters' he had in mind of course the headquarters of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Too many Red Guards started to bombard any headquarters they could find, including some Red Guards who started to express, in a tentative way, opposition to all bureaucracy. In early 1968 Mao, especially under pressure from Zhou Enlai, decided to put an end to the movement. A key turning point was the decision by the 'revolutionary committee' in Shanghai to create a 'Paris Commune'-type administration of the city, after months of bloody military battles had given the committee victory over the local party apparatus.
The new line of the Maoist faction became the building of 'three in one' revolutionary committees. The committees were to consist of Red Guards, revolutionary 'cadres' and the PLA. In fact this meant demobilising the Red Guard committees under the tutelage of the army and the party. Mao closed down the Red Guards; after their demobilisation thousands were sent to do menial work in the countryside. But the Cultural Revolution had achieved its aim: Mao had defeated his factional opponents.
From the Cultural revolution to the death of Mao
The victory of the Mao faction was however pyhhric. Mao and his allies had won the factional battle, but the havoc wrought by the cultural revolution turned tens of thousands of party cadres against the 'leftist' bureaucratic commandism of Mao, with its ambitions to transform social relations without having first created the material conditions for such a transformation. The basis was thereby created for a future clash among the different factions of the bureaucracy after Mao's death in 1976.
During the Cultural Revolution a battle had broken out between different cliques in the pro-Mao faction. One was led by Lin Biao, based especially on the PLA commanders, and the other by Mao's wife Jianq Qing, with the support of the 'revolutionary committee' in Shanghai. At the outset of the Cultural Revolution Lin Biao had been named as Mao's successor, and this was even written into the constitution. But in 1970-71 the struggle between the two groups intensified, and Jianq Qing's group – later to become notorious as the 'Gang of Four' – gained the upper hand. Lin Biao died in 1971, allegedly in a plane crash near the Mongolian border, 'attempting to escape to the Soviet Union'.
After Zhou Enlai's death in January 1976, Deng Xiaoping, who had enjoyed Zhou's protection, was dismissed and fled to Canton. In September Mao himself died and a three-way struggle for power broke out. Jiang Qing's Gang of Four represented the politics of extreme 'third periodist' ultra-left bureacrative commandism. Jiang, who had used her position to take revenge on political opponents, and had run her own torture chambers during the Cultural Revolution, wanted a return to the more extreme policies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution itself. Deng, in hiding, now formed an alliance with Zhoa Ziyang and constituted a 'right' opposition. A centre group was led by Hua Guofeng, who, it emerged, had been nominated by Mao as his successor.
With Deng in hiding the real struggle developed between the Gang of Four and the Hua Guofeng group. The Gang plotted to carry out a military coup, but on the night of 5th October 1976 Hua, supported by Wang Dongxing and Ye Jianying, used the Bejing garrison to arrest the Gang at a meeting of the Politburo in a preemptory strike. Hua became the new leader, promising 'continuity' with Mao's policies. But the defeat of the Gang of Four represented something crucial in the battle over China's future: since the end of the Cultural Revolution the Communist Party itself, virtually destroyed by the Red Guards, had been rebuilt. Purged cadres and regional party bosses had gradually got back their positions.
The defeat of the 'gang' represented the posthumous revenge of the party apparatus on Mao, despite the accession to power of Hua Guofeng. The party apparatus began to prepare the end of all Mao's policies.
The 'Four Modernisations'
The period 1976-80 represents a critical turning point because it was during this period that the policy changes and the leadership team behind the present Chinese crisis crystallised. In April 1976 the famous Tienanmen Square 'incident' took place, when a hundred thousand people demonstrated in memory of Zhou Enlai, demanding democracy and a better life. The demonstration was brutally put down by troops. Following the death of Mao, and the smashing of the 'Gang of Four', Deng Xiaoping, who had strong links with certain sections of the Hua leadership (especially Marshall Ye Jianying), was officially rehabilitated. A troika took the leadership (Hua, Ye and Deng), with Hua Guofeng in the official leadership position. But it was Deng who started to make the pace in the debates on policy which ensued.
In 1975 Deng had written three documents (described by the Gang of Four as the 'three poisonous weeds') in which he outlined a wide-ranging 'new course' for China's development. The ideas in these documents, probably discussed with Zhou Enlai before his death, became known as the 'Four Modernisations'. The four modernisations are the updating of industry, agriculture, science and technology and defence, to make China a modern industrial nation by the year 2000. In 1978 a ten year plan was adopted along the lines of the 'four modernisations'.
The essence of the four modernisations is as follows:
a) de-collectivisation of agriculture and the recreation of private peasant farming – although without abolishing all co-operatives;
b) the modernisation of industry utilising Western management techniques, bonuses for high production, profit and loss accounting, and a 'shake out' of 'surplus labour';
c) an attempt to introduce a much more widespread utilisation of Western technology through the introduction of Western capital in special enterprise zones and in joint projects with Western transnational corporations.
Below we outline the successes and failures of this policy, and its social consequences. But two elements of the political development must be mentioned first.
By mid-1978 a bitter battle was ranging inside the leadership between the Deng faction and the Hua faction. The latter wanted to identify with Mao and the Cultural Revolution, but distance itself from the extreme policies of the Gang of Four. Hua's group was dubbed the 'whateverist' faction – whatever Mao said was right – while the Deng faction became more and more critical of Mao's 'politics in command' line. The final victory of the Deng-Zhao Ziyang group was achieved at the 1980 congress, where an anti-Mao 'economics has priority over politics' line was adopted, and Hua resigned as premier to be replaced by Zhao.
At the height of the conflict between the Deng and Hua factions, in November 1978, Deng was seen by broad sections of the masses as the more enlightened, anti-bureaucratic leader. Suddenly posters claiming that Mao had committed many bureaucratic errors appeared on a stretch of wall opposite the Mao museum and around Tienanmen Square. This 'democracy wall' movement was tolerated by the Dengists who saw it as useful in their battle against Hua. Almost immediately unofficial journals debating every aspect of democracy and the economic way forward appeared. Many purely literary journals appeared, by a real dissidents movement developed with hundreds of journals nation-wide. Unlike the Soviet dissidents at that time, the Chinese dissidents nearly all expressed themselves in terms of Marxism and the correct form of proletarian dictatorship. Views very close to Trotskyism and anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialism were expressed. A National Association of Unofficial Publications was set up.
The Tienanmen Square incident of April 1976, and the 'Democracy Movement' of 1978-80 are the precursors of the current developments in China. In both these movements and in the current events, as far as we know, no section of the movment has called for re-establishing capitalism. The 'Internationale' is the universal song of protest – against the bureaucracy but evidently not against socialism.
By April 1981 Deng had had enough of the 'Beijing Spring' movement. His power had been consolidated and the anti-bureaucratic character of many of the unofficial publications was beginning to alarm the authorities. A general clampdown and repression ensued. In some cases the repression was vicious, with leaders of the movement being sentenced to up to 15 years imprisonment.
Contradictions of the New Economic Policy
The mass student movement of December 1986 and the present massive mobilisation directly stem from the effects of the 'New Economic Policy' initiated by the Ten Year Plan of 1978.
In agriculture the new economic thinking has provided for a run down of collectives and the introduction of the 'household responsibility system'. This envisaged the equal distribution of land to peasants to farm household-by-household. Although in theory the land remains owned by the state, in practice there have been many cases of the land being sold to establish larger plots.
The effects of this plan have been twofold. First – and there is no denying it – agricultural production has increased dramatically. The break with bureaucratic commandism was welcomed by many peasants who took the opportunity of de-regulation to produce more to earn more by selling their produce privately in the city and town markets. Undoubtedly, before the de-collectivisation Chinese agriculture was suffering from the effects of forced collectivisation, and peasant resistance to this. This effect closely parallels was happened for decades in the Soviet Union after the forced collectivisation of 1929-31.
However, the obvious social effect of the 'NEP' in agriculture has been the re-emergence of sharp class differentiations among the peasantry. New layers of rich and middle peasants have arisen, and big disparities have grown up in the wealth of different regions according to the natural productivity of agriculture. Some peasants with unsustainable plots have become in effect proletarianised, turned into rural labourers in the employ of rich peasants. Others have left the land to look for work in the cities.
In addition to the class differentiation among rural farmers, rural industrial enterprises and even social services like schools have come under what is effectively private control, or at least private financing.
In industry, the basic turn in approach was made by the 'Thirty Point Decision on Industry' adopted by the party Central Committee in 1978. This has had the effect of introducing a new management structure, replacing the party and workers' committees by a hierarchical management structure. Differentials in wages have been sharply increased. Tens of thousands of workers have been fired in an economic 'rationalisation'. Security of employment and the egalitarian ethos have been dispensed with. State deficit financing in the ten year plan in industry has impelled inflation, leading to recurrent price rises of basic staples.
Many projects have been started with foreign capitalist concerns, and Chinese enterprises encouraged to deal directly with foreign capital (ethnic Chinese abroad have been especially encouraged to invest in China). A new class of Chinese capitalists has arisen as owners of private ventures; but despite this the largest and most dynamic sector of Chinese industry remains in state hands.
The effect of the economic reforms in the urban industrial areas has paralleled those in the countryside. Economic inequality and a black market have grown up. Chinese millionaires rub shoulders with tens of thousands of urban unemployed. There is no doubting that the balance sheet of the economic reforms is growth – but at the expense of important sectors of the workers.
The demand for 'democracy'
One effect of China's closer integration with the world market has been the opening up of China to tourism and information from abroad, with thousands of Chinese students going to advanced capitalist countries to study. The emergence of a mass student movement for democracy in December 1986 – the direct descendant of the 'Beijing Spring' movement – was directly linked the movement of the French students in that month, and also to the announcement in Taiwan that the ruling Kuomintang regime was going to allow the formation of an opposition political party. The December 1986 movement spread rapidly to all the main universities of China, but at that time reamined mainly limited to the students. They demanded an independent student union and the introduction of 'multipartyism' and a democratic political system.
The present movement in Beijing, Shanghai and other major centres, involving the mobilisation of millions of workers, students and intellectuals, is the continuation of the December 1986 movement. It is inspired not only by the pitiful and abject conditions in which the students live, and their insecurity about getting a job, but by popular outrage at the inequalities and corruption which have gone with the reforms. In effect, China has had a radical 'perestroika' applied to its economy, but no 'glasnost' whatever.
Indeed, the regime as a whole – 'hardliners' and 'liberals' – is a brutally repressive one. Last year up to 30,000 prisoners, many of them charged with petty offences, were executed by the authorities, a clear indication of the savage brutality which the regime is capable of.
The Chinese students and the millions who have mobilised to defend them have sounded the death knell for the present system of rule. If Deng and Li Peng insist on repression and refuse to institute 'glasnost'-type reforms political unrest and bound to re-emerge. Out of the present movement, new political currents and movements are bound to develop. Behind the red flag and singing the 'Internationale', the revolutionary masses of China are on the march again.
20.5.89
This article is dedicated to the memory of Lin Zhao, a student at Beijing's Beida university, arrested by the secret police in 1957 for opposing Mao's 'anti-rightist campaign'. After 18 years of imprisonment she was shot in 1975.